Lost Beatles tape to be restored and given to “national cultural institution”

nme.com:

The Beatles performing live is set to be restored and given to a “national cultural institution” in the UK.Earlier this week (April 4), it was announced that the recording had been found almost exactly 60 years to the day it was made.

The hour-long, quarter-inch tape recording was created by John Bloomfield at Stowe boarding school in Buckinghamshire on April 4, 1963, when The Beatles performed a gig there.Bloomfield, who is now 75 years old, was only 15 at the time.

He revealed the existence of the tape to journalist Samira Ahmed visited Stowe when they visited to make a special programme for Radio 4’s Front Row to mark the gig’s 60th anniversary.Now, there are plans to restore the old tape, which contains a full length gig performance and includes spoken word segments from the band as they interacted with the audience.“Talks are under way to get [the tape] cleaned up and for a permanent home in a national cultural institution,” Ahmed told The Observer. “John [Bloomfield] feels strongly that it should not end up, as so many Beatles relics have, in the vault of a private individual.”“It was a unique Beatles gig, performed in front of an almost entirely male audience,” Ahmed wrote of the discovery recently. “And crucially, despite loud cheers and some screaming, the tape is not drowned out by the audience reaction.”The setlist was made up of songs from The Beatles’ debut album ‘Please Please Me’, which had been released on March 22, 1963, as well as some of the legendary group’s R&B cover versions.A live rendition of ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ kicked off the performance before the band transitioned into their take on Chuck Berry’s 1956 single ‘Too Much Monkey Business’.